‘But it wouldn’t have worked, you know. I didn’t even consider it seriously. It was nice of her, I thought, but I didn’t want her, it’s true.’
‘And I expect you made it clear in a fairly testy way?’
He thought about it. I suppose in the end I did. She kept on about it, you see. Asked me several times. Came to Quantum to beg me. I got tired of it and said no pretty definitely. I told her not to keep bothering me…’ He looked shattered. ‘She began to hate me then, do you think?’
I nodded unhappily. ‘I’d think so. I think she finally believed she would never have what she craved for. You could have given it to her, and you wouldn’t. The rejection was ultimate. Absolute. Extreme. She believed it, as she’d never really believed it before. She told me she’d given you a chance, but you’d turned her down.’
He put a hand over his eyes.
‘So she set out to kill you, and finally to kill the house as well… to destroy what she couldn’t have.’
I still wondered, as I’d wondered in New York, whether it was because I, Ian, had gone back to live at Quantum with Malcolm that she’d come to that great violent protest. I had too often had what she’d yearned for. The bomb had been meant as much for me as for Malcolm, I thought.
‘Do you remember that morning when she found we weren’t dead?’ I asked. ‘She practically fainted. Everyone supposed it was from relief, but I’ll bet it wasn’t. She’d tried three times to kill you and it must have seemed intolerable to her that you were still alive.’
‘She must have been… well… insane.’
Obsessed… insane. Sometimes there wasn’t much difference.
Malcolm had given up champagne and gone back to scotch. The constant bubbles, I saw, had been a sort of gesture, two fingers held up defiantly in the face of danger, a gallant crutch against fear. He poured a new drink of the old stuff and stood by the window looking over Green Park.
‘You knew it was Serena… who would come.’
‘If anyone did.’
‘How did you know?’
‘I saw everyone, as you know. I saw what’s wrong with their lives. Saw their desperations. Donald and Helen are desperate for money, but they were coping the best way they could. Bravely, really, pawning her jewellery. They thought you might help them with guaranteeing a loan, if they could find you. That’s a long way from wanting to kill you.’
Malcolm nodded and drank, and watched life proceeding outside.
‘Lucy,’ I said, ‘may have lost her inspiration but not her marbles. Edwin is petulant but not a planner, not dynamic. Thomas…’ I paused. ‘Thomas was absolutely desperate, but for peace in his house, not for the money itself. Berenice has made him deeply ineffective. He’s got a long way to go, to climb back. He seemed to me incapable almost of tying his shoelaces, let alone making a time-bomb, even if he did invent the wired-up clocks.’
‘Go on,’ Malcolm said.
‘Berenice is obsessed with herself and her desires, but her grudge is against Thomas. Money would make her quieter, but it’s not money she really wants, it’s a son. Killing Moira and you wouldn’t achieve that.’
‘And Gervase?’
‘He’s destroying himself. It takes all his energies. He hasn’t enough left to go around killing people for money. He’s lost his nerve. He drinks. You have to be courageous and sober to mess with explosives. Ursula’s desperation takes her to churches and to lunches with Joyce.’
He grunted in his throat, not quite a chuckle.
Joyce had been thanked by us on the telephone on the Saturday night when we’d come back exhausted. She’d been devastated to the point of silence about what had happened and had put the phone down in tears. We phoned her again in the morning, i got Serena first,’ she said sorrowfully. ‘She must have gone out and bought all the stuff… I can’t bear it. That dear little girl, so sweet when she was little, even though I hated her mother. So awful.’
‘Go on, then,’ Malcolm said. ‘You keep stopping.’
‘It couldn’t have been Alicia or Vivien, they’re not strong enough to carry you. Alicia’s new boyfriend would be, but why should he think Alicia would be better off with you dead? And I couldn’t imagine any of them constructing a bomb.’
‘And Ferdinand?’
I really couldn’t see it, could you? He has no particular worries. He’s good at his job. He’s easy-going most of the time. Not him. Not